[tex-live] 8.3 file name restrictions

[Vladimir Volovich]

"RF" == Robin Fairbairns writes:

 >> Hence those of us who run both OS' on one computer tend to format
 >> the Windows partition using the older FAT form.

 RF> which will be fat-32, not dos fat.  fat-32 doesn't enforce dos
 RF> fat's silly file name restrictions.

actually, it is "vfat" which is an extension to the FAT directory
format which allows to store (long) unicode filenames on the FAT
partition. the partition itself may be either FAT16 or FAT32 - it does
not matter: FAT16 differs from FAT32 only by the (maximum) number of
allowed clusters on the file system (2^16 in case of FAT16 and 2^32 in
case of FAT32); but both FAT16 and FAT32 can contain long filenames:
they won't be visible by legacy DOS versions, but will be visible
under windows95 and later versions (and on linux, of course, with
the "vfat" filesystem type).

Best,
v.